The Long Brief: Sacred Authority
From millet logic to modern monopoly: how a clerk became a gatekeeper of belonging.
Shalom, friends.
Over the past months, I’ve been asked about the Rabbinate a number of times—by email from readers, from friends from shul, from family. So, this long brief is my attempt to answer that with some structure.
There’s also a personal reason this subject refused to stay theoretical.
My spouse and I are in the middle of our own aliyah process. Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Jewish Agency have been professional and supportive throughout. The delay has come from the Ministry of the Interior. Our file has been stalled for nearly a year. No clear timeline. No substantive explanation. Just silence.
When we applied, the ministry was under Shas. Personal-status questions and discretionary authority tend to slow under that portfolio. With Shas out of government, there is—finally—some cautious hope.
I’m sharing this not to step into the spotlight, but because it clarified something central to this brief: for many, the Rabbinate and its adjacent bureaucracies are not encountered as guardians of meaning. They are encountered as a disfunctional and sprawling bureaucracy. Clerks. Files. Authority without explanation.
That experience—scaled up across marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, and diaspora relations—is what this Long Brief examines. Not theology. Power. Not faith. Governance.
If you’re a reader with a topic you’d like us to examine at this level—deep structure, not headlines—email me. Many of our strongest briefs began exactly that way.
Sacred Authority
The Chief Rabbinate and Israel’s Unresolved Sovereignty Question
The Chief Rabbinate sits at the center of one of Israel’s oldest internal fights because it is not symbolic. It is a state-backed hurdle. It decides who may marry. How divorce proceeds. What counts as “kosher.” Who passes the conversion chokepoint with a stamp the state treats as determinative in daily life. People experience it as a clerk with coercive authority hiding behind religious vocabulary.
It is how the system is encountered in practice. Even would-be citizens—people already cleared by national institutions tasked with facilitating aliyah—can find themselves stalled for months, if not longer, inside opaque administrative loops, with no explanation beyond jurisdiction and discretion. When authority operates this way, legitimacy erodes quietly.
In Israel, you can ignore the Rabbinate for years—until you need it, and it reminds you it never ignored you.
A century ago, Rav Kook imagined a national rabbinate that could harmonize a rebuilding society. That vision had grandeur. A hundred years later, the reality is… less grand. Politicization, bureaucracy, and periodic scandal have come to define an institution that behaves more like a regulatory cartel which forgot it serves the public.
Israel never wrote a full constitution because its leaders could not agree where Jewish law ends and civil law begins. The Rabbinate sits on that deferral. It occupies a gray zone between synagogue and state, wielding legal authority from the state while claiming legitimacy from tradition.
The 2023 constitutional crisis dragged religion into the center of the storm. In ICLRS’s “Talk About” series, Gila Stopler described the regime transformation effort as marking “the start of an intra-Jewish religious war,” explicitly tying the constitutional struggle to the religious dimension of Israeli identity and governance. Even when the formal arguments are about judicial power, the practical stakes often include religion-state authority. Who controls conversion frameworks. How religious courts relate to civil rights. What kinds of exemptions become law. Whether the state slides toward a thicker Orthodox public sphere through legislation—rather than persuasion, as a norm in a democratic society.
The Chief Rabbinate is not a religious institution the state happens to fund. It is a state institution that governs in religious language.
Which explains the outsized anger. Many rage because the Rabbinate turns Judaism into enforcement—and enforcement might just be the worst marketing strategy in Jewish history. The public’s posture, even as it pushes back against the Rabbinate, is “We want Jewishness. Just without humiliation, extraction, and overt politics.” The polling is quite clear: Israelis can be both deeply attached to tradition and still want the Rabbinate cut down to size—especially among traditional non-religious Jews. And when Israelis rate religious institutions as corrupt at striking levels, they are not offering a theological critique. They are describing an institution they experience as compromised.
Every attempt to “just manage the status quo” keeps producing the same output: cyclical crises, mutual suspicion, and a public that increasingly treats the Rabbinate as something to evade rather than respect.